Nick’s Tutorials has released Operator Ambience Vol. 1, a set of high quality, royalty free patches for Ableton’s do-it-all software synthesizer Operator.

Get inspired with this premium set of 20 ambient and atmospheric Operator patches!

Following many of the same design principles presented in my “Sound Design In Ableton Live: Operator” tutorial series, Operator Ambience Vol. 1 will extend your patch library while also continuing to provide ideas and education for FM synthesis and Operator.

Operator Ambience Vol. 1 features

20 Operator patches that are completely open to reverse-engineering, tweaking, and learning.

20 modifiable Live Clips corresponding with the patches which provide musical phrases and inspiration.

1 substantive introductory video packed with Ableton Live tips as well as detailing common elements between all the patches.

20 short videos detailing unique or noteworthy aspects of each patch, giving insight into their construction and suggestions for using them.

Operator Ambience Vol. 1 is available to purchase for $9.99 USD. A 25% discount is available when purchasing 2 or more items by using coupon code “BULK” at checkout.

A mapping by 1024 Architecture, projected on the facade of former Lyrical theater the “Celestins”. The building deformations and figures were controlled by the audience, using a microphone and an audio analysis algorythm.

The official Tenori on iOS app enter the app store the other week but at £12 I was a little hesitant to buy it. After a little thought and a bit of googling I decided it was indeed worth the price.

The cheapest hardware Tenori-On (the TNR-O) is roughly £500 where as the current price of the iPad 2 is £499 (cheapest wifi only model) so considering that both the devices are pretty much exactly the same price (and I already own an iPad) it makes sence to get the iOS version.

Peter Kirn over at Create Digital Music did a post on a new synth by Madrona Labs last month. Even though I wasn’t in the market for a new synth right now I ended up buying this Aalto within an hour or so of downloading the demo so I wanted to pass this along and help promote Madrona’s great work. At $99 this is an incredible value.

You’ve heard the gripes, and heard and seen the somewhat unscientific demos. Now it’s time to examine the over-compression of music with – science! Earl Vickers of STMicroelectronics examines the Loudness Wars in an academic paper, as noted to us by reader photohounds.

Peter at Create Digital Music:
Chicago-based hacker and synthesist Matt Heins is working on an open source synth kit. As a co-creator of the MeeBlip open source-synth hardware, I’m biased — I want more open synth hardware! So this is looking like some great company. The instrument is 8-bit, with analog filter circuitry, coded in C.

Could you imagine the concept of television re-imagined for sound designers only? How would that be?

How would be a Field Recording TV channel? or can you imagine a show where you can see how the sound of a recent film was done? or what about watching some channels where you can find other guys like you recording sounds outside the world? What if you could watch interviews with different sound designers each night while you drink a cup coffee?

Well, I’ve created something like that, but using the Internet. It’s called Designing Sound TV, a new website packed with lots videos about sound for films, video games, tv, and more. There you can find all kind of stuff on sound design, field reording, foley, mixing, and more.

Music Thing is back! (though Tom notes that “Normal service will not, I’m afraid, be resumed…”)

After almost two years since the last blog post Tom Whitwell returns with a list of 23 DIY guitar effect pedal kits.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve spent a few evenings building DIY guitar effects. It's fun to build things that you can use. If you want to get started, one of the hardest things is buying components. Try to buy a 10Ω resistor from Farnell, and you’re faced with a choice of 345 items. So, starting out buying a kit is a good idea. At least you’ll know the parts are right, even if when your soldering isn’t.

However, not many people sell kits. Despite the potential markup on a handful of bulk components, the customer service is – presumably – a nightmare. Here are 23 companies who will sell you complete component kits for guitar effects – many more people produce PCBs, or sell finished pedals. Stay tuned for similar lists on synths/noise boxes and tube amplifiers.

# Google Translate Beatboxing – If you haven’t heard about Google Translate’s beatboxing skills yet you probably spend a more than healthy amount of time away from the interwebs. Check it out, it’s cool.

Jon Tidey at Audio Geek Zine shares some useful tips on editing & workflow as part of a series of 9 interviews with recording engineers from around the world.

What is Home Recording Tactics? This is a collection of audio interviews with 9 hard working, successful home studio engineers (including me). The interviews were led by Joe Gilder of Home Studio Corner. He got these guys to share all their secrets on a variety of home recording topics.

Who says technology has to move fast and die young? Leon Theremin may have been a full century ahead of his time, before computers, before transistors, before jet engines or atomic power or rockets.

ReacTable creator Martin Kaltenbrunner has a virtual Theremin prototype built with Microsoft’s depth-sensing, 3D Kinect camera. And what he really needs is some players of the real Theremin to help develop it.

SoundCloud’s iPhone app makes it easy to record and share your sounds from anywhere.

Today, we’re excited about the release of the recording feature.

The Record button will make it easy for you to capture all kinds of sounds right on SoundCloud & with the iPhone app and share them from anywhere to everywhere on the web: your website, social network profiles or simply between friends & family.

Peter Kirn talks with Sebastian Dittmann, CEO of developer Audanika, developer of SoundPrism, the app they describe as something they are not entirely sure of what it is. From audanika.com: "We think it might be a musical instrument but we're learning new stuff playing with it every day… which sometimes goes beyond the scale of that."

Peter Kirn writes:

Using an array of rectangles arranged in a harmonically useful way, and color coding for pitch, SoundPrism is a glimpse of a more graphical future for music software design. (Nor is this necessarily limited to the iPad in the long term – in addition to Windows 7, Ubuntu 10.10 is getting official multitouch support, which I think both validates Apple’s work and suggests we’ll see more platforms for this kind of interface.)

And, bonus, it all demonstrates why arranging pitch by the Circle of Thirds can be ideal. I got a chance to talk to the developers of SoundPrism about the thinking behind the software.

Resampling is an incredibly simple yet powerful technique in digital music production. The idea is straighforward: Record the output of one or multiple tracks into a new, editable audio file. It’s not much different than rendering your composition, except here you’re actually going to incorporate the new file into the current song.

Leon Theremin (born Lev Sergeyevich Terme) was born on this day, August 15th, 1896. To help celebrate I’m going to do a bit of a stream of consciousness post and will offer some links on Leon and his wonderful instrument and some notes on my use of it.

Hang in there till the end of the post as I’ve created a Soundcloud set called “Theremin Action” which is a collection of all the songs from REBOOT and I Hear Your Signals that use that Theremin sound or Theremin as a Controller.

Mark controls virtual synths in Ableton Live using the Theremin and Percussa AudioCubes

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